Unfortunately, Love Tends to Screw With Priorities
by Quixotic Basementor Knight
Summary: The 219 year old gray elf Locke has become pretty tired of humans’ bad habit of dying within 100 years.  He’s never known any of his own kind, but he does know that he’s sick to death of it, pun unintended. Then Kate, a human, starts giving him trouble.


Full Summary:  
After having lived for two hundred and nineteen years, the gray elf Locke has become pretty tired of the bad habit humans have of dying within a rather short eighty years. He's never known any of his own kind, but what he _**does**_ know is that he's sick to deathof the people he knows dying all the time. (No pun intended) That's why he decided not to develop any more lasting connections with humans, and has set out to find out where he came from, particularly since there's a chance that his parents, whoever they were, are still alive somewhere. However, a human woman named Kathryne Ire, called Kate, keeps finding new ways to get in his way…  
Adventure/Romance/Humor

Disclaimer:  
The events here are actually based off of a D&D character I once made who ended up with a really nice back-story and personality, meriting it getting written down. Therefore, it is more or less based off of a D&D campaign setting. However, if you _do _know D&D, you'll see that I'm obviously taking a lot of liberties with it.  
D&D is copyright by Wizards of the Coast. All the individual characters themselves, however, are entirely of my own creation, along with a great deal of the setting itself.

* * *

**In Need Of A Plan C**

Locke cursed under his breath as the bolt of lightning rebounded harmlessly off of the dragon's red-scaled hide. He had hoped to be able to inflict as much damage as he could without being noticed. He had planned on employing evocation, his favorite school of magic, to do the trick. Evocation in general refers to magic that creates energy, and in Locke's case, usually meant destroying things with his preference of fire, ice, or lightning.

The dragon's head whirled towards him, eyes flashing in the mid-afternoon sun, and stared him down where he stood just out of a large clearing in the forest, about five-hundred feet from a large cavern which the dragon just then leapt into flight out of.

Not wanting to be caught in a forest fire, Locke quickly ran towards the beast, about fifty feet into the clearing before he stopped short, mind racing to think up his next move. As a student of both divine and arcane magic, Locke found fighting that did not involve keeping a minimum distance of fifty feet between him and his opponents to be less than ideal. It was usually made at least somewhat better when two or three large, muscled men holding large, shiny swords stood between him and the onrushing enemy.

Unfortunately, though, at the moment Locke couldn't have afforded the services of even the greenest of mercenaries. Being able to use divine magic to draw power directly from a deity and being able to use the arcane to manipulate the fabric of the universe somehow did not preclude a man from having all sorts of out-of-pocket expenses. The fact was, it was pretty difficult to pay the bills when Plan A was virtually always "Kill it with evocation." and Plan B, "Run the hell away."

The young red dragon did not seem inclined to be understanding of Locke's financial troubles as it whipped its head around and spat a large fireball at him. Locke dropped to the ground instantly, and the fire itself blazed harmlessly above his head. The heat, however, was still enough to make the edges of his long leather coat smoke and to make his back feel as though he had just laid back onto a bed of hot coals. His exposed neck felt as though it had been touched with a hot brand. As soon as the flames had passed, he leapt to his feet in spite of the protests the angry welts on his back gave at feeling the rough wool of his shirt and breeches shifting against them. Locke thought that wool was probably the worst fabric in the world to have scraping itself against rapidly blistering skin. He made a mental note to get a shirt of a finer weave.

The dragon was still a good thirty seconds away from reaching him at the speed it was flying, and it probably wouldn't be able to muster another fireball for at least another ten, if he remembered it right. So Locke forcefully ignored his burns and open himself up to the power of Budai, the Laughing Buddha, who was kind enough to grant him a good deal of divine power in exchange for a comparatively insignificant amount of reverence. He felt his body filled with white light, and his burns disappeared as instantaneously as they had come. He then directed the flow of divine power in him, deftly weaving it into a complex enchantment that would block out heat in case the dragon breathed fire at him again.

The dragon now nearly upon him, Locke muttered _"__Invenio__Primum__" _to key his glove to release the finely carved mahogany staff that had been magically contained in it. He shifted his grip on the staff, and then struck the dragon hard on the head as it reached him. The magic behind the blow was supposed to make the dragon stop dead in its tracks, and hold it paralyzed for a good thirty seconds at the least. But the dragon's hide seemed to have repelled the magic once again.

It was then that Locke realized that he really needed a Plan C for those rare moments, like this one, when his evocation had failed him and his opponent was fast enough to make running away impossible. He thought that "Try not to die" would make a good starting framework.

Being still quite a young, for a dragon, it was only about twice the size of Locke. Exactly how much bigger it was than him became somewhat irrelevant, though, when it swooped down on him, slamming him into the dirt. He struggled underneath the dragon's enormous weight and managed to pull his dagger from its sheath at his belt. He, thankfully, had the foresight to make sure he purchased a dagger enchanted to be able to pierce a dragon's steel-resistant hide. They wrestled, which is a polite way of saying that Locke resisted the dragon's attempts to pin him motionless, and Locke managed to score a single stab on the dragon while it slashed at his belly with its claws, tearing easily through his brown wool shirt. Locke squirmed and wriggled and writhed as best as he could, but the dragon managed to seize both of his hands into one of its foreclaws, while holding his torso to the dirt by practically lying on top of him. He struggled, and managed to headbutt the dragon's nose as he kept his neck away from teeth that glittered with saliva in afternoon sun. His legs kicked vainly at the air, and Locke vaguely wished he had learned how to do magic without needing to do the complicated hand motions- the somatics. He hadn't been in many situations worse than this one, trapped between a dragon and a hard place and able to use as much magic as a housecat.

Locke twisted and jerked vainly as the dragon decided to simply tear him to shreds with its claws instead of trying to deliver a fatal bite to his throat. The dragon had been clawing Locke to shreds for a good thirty more seconds (without, to Locke's dissatisfaction, him being able to struggle out of its grasp enough to score another stab with the dagger) when it suddenly reared back in pain. Locke glimpsed the fletching of an arrow standing out on the dragon's scaly back. He took the opportunity to wriggle his arm free from the distracted dragon's foreclaw, managing to catch it again with a swipe of his dagger. The dragon spasmed as another arrow pierced it, and leapt off of Locke and towards the new attacker. Locke painfully struggled to his feet as he pulled more holy energy into himself, healing his wounds. The dragon was rushing off into the trees at an attacker Locke did not see hiding somewhere among them. Clearly, his savior had not thought too carefully about what you get when you mix fire with lots and lots of wood, and had not factored in the relatively defenseless village nearby.

Locke tried to get the dragon's attention, but it was too late. The dragon unleashed his breath at the forest, and Locke caught sight of a human shape leaping out of the branches of a tree while somehow dropping a shortbow and drawing a hand-and-a-half sword simultaneously. The fire, fortunately, didn't seem to catch in any of the trees, although Locke saw a few branches smoldering. He could take care of that later by conjuring up some water, and so long as there wasn't any open flame, it shouldn't spread quickly.

His rescuer, meanwhile, charged straight at the dragon, slightly overlong sword held in one hand, the other held out for balance at her side. At any rate, from this distance she looked more like a woman than a man, and Locke didn't feel like it would turn out to be important until after the dragon had been taken down. The sword-wielder leapt toward the dragon, pulling her left hand up to meet her right on the sword's grip as she lifted it over her head. She met the dragon mid-leap, slashing vertically and catching it across the chest. The dragon howled in pain and began to fly back and get some distance on her. By that time, however, Locke was ready to fire another bolt of lightning at it. White light flashed from his hand. It caught the dragon in the belly, and caused it to howl in pain. _This _spell, he noted somewhat smugly, _had_ managed to pierce the magically resistant hide.

The dragon tumbled out of the air towards the ground, and the sword-wielder ran straight for it and stabbed it through the heart. The dragon writhed on the ground for a few moments, and then lay still.

Locke, ignoring the woman for the moment, ran over towards the trees where some branches still smoldered, and then tried to climb one awkwardly before giving up. He pulled out his spellbook, flipped through the pages and dug something out from his belt pouch. Then, he read aloud an incantation, balancing the spellbook on his left palm while performing the somatic components with his right hand. He jumped up into the air and sailed up to the branches, sent water drenching out of his palms everywhere he saw the slightest bit of blackened wood or smoke, and then went sailing back down to the ground. Now that all the danger was past, he took a closer look at the person who had saved him.

She was most definitely a fine-looking woman, even though her long light brown hair was tangled and unkempt and dragon's blood had spattered her clothing. She dressed with a simple elegance he approved of, with a dark gray cloak over a long-sleeved red shirt and black trousers. She also wore a thick leather tunic sown with steel discs, and padded leather bands around her elbows and knees. Her oval face wore a mischievous smile with the half-contained glee that made it blaringly obvious that not only was this the first dragon she'd ever beaten, but also that she thought that it was quite something to be proud of.

Locke had never faced a dragon, either, but held no illusions that there was anything special about it now that he had done it, nor anything to be gained by doing. Except, of course, for the dragon's hoarded gold and magically enchanted items- the reason he'd come in the first place. He noted somewhat self-consciously that his shirt had been completely torn to pieces, and his long leather coat needed to be repaired in several places. He normally dressed quite plainly, but if anything, it was more to suit his ego than out of any real modesty. He liked to put on a show of seeming deceptively plain, but at the moment, he looked more disheveledly ragtag. Locke did not like it when other people considered themselves more impressive than he- particularly when the main talents of those people lay in their use of weapons. Magic seemed to him innately superior to any other sort of fighting in every way- after all, he could even _give _himself martial talents when he needed them, thanks to Budai.

At least he still stood a good foot and a half taller than she did. At seven feet and two inches, Locke had never met someone who he didn't look down on in at the very least the physical way, and it was most often in the other ways as well. He was the only gray elf in the Midlands, as far as he knew, and humans had started to impress him less and less as they kept dying before he did. The only man he really had any respect for was his former mentor, Han Tzu, who had raised Locke from when he was a child, and now, two hundred years later, still had the grizzled gray hair and lined face Locke had always known. He was the only one Locke really listened to- except, of course, when warning about the dangers of pride, as Han Tzu liked to do. Han Tzu's favorite joke, since meeting Locke, had become, "Why is it that gray elves are taller than regular elves? So they can look down on them!"

Locke didn't know if his pride was inherited or was just something that came to you when every other being you saw seemed like a child in comparison. He had never met a person taller than himself, and even the eldest of other people he met were still half his own age. He supposed he didn't look a whole lot like a gray-elf, though, for although he still had the stature, overly long ears, and, of course, the light gray eyes, he had cut his hair very short, and even grew a little bit of a scruffy beard. Even if he did often act with an arrogance everyone associated with gray elves, he was certainly far from what they imagined gray elves looked like. It made them react to him as though his overly inflated ego was his own, rather than some somewhat racially inherited and thus excusable and ignorable flaw. He liked it that way.

But the simple elegance of his brown shirt, black breeches, and long leather coat that went down halfway to his thighs probably wouldn't show through when his shirt was in tatters and his coat was rumpled and torn. But Locke was a master at manipulation, so he figured he could use the image to spin a tale and get what he was after, even if the woman did –rightly, he thought- demand her fair share of the dragon's treasure.

He hunched a little bit, so as to be only a foot taller than the woman, and walked over to her with his hands clasped together. "Thank you so much for saving me!" he said, with a dumb sort of innocence he achieved by imitating a country bumpkin he had once gotten impatient with on his way here, to the dragon's cave.

He seemed to have pulled it off; she immediately looked slightly impatient with him. _I suppose __we've got__ that much in common_ he mused dryly. "It was nothing," she said. "After all, I was seeking the dragon's treasure, and that well-placed lightning of yours helped to take the beast down."

Locke grew instantly annoyed and drew himself up to his full height. "It more than _helped _take the beast down; it all but did the whole of it!" He barked with a sudden ferocity and contempt, and not all of it was feigned. He had expect this to take her off guard enough to get her to agree to promise that he have the ring in the dragon's hoard, but her response was completely unfazed.

"So I suppose you were doing just fine, as it clawed out your entrails?" she drawled, her tone changing just as fast as his had, "Would you perhaps like to go and find another dragon to get in a wrestling match with, so you can show me that it was all part of your ingenious plan to lull the dragon into a false sense of security?"

He had been planning to claim that the ring was an old family heirloom, and that it was all he wanted out of the treasure. He wasn't sure that the strategy might not still work, but he _was _sure that his ego would never allow it, at this point.

"You would've had just as hard a time if not for me," he said, "unless you think you could stick it with that nice sword of yours, or shoot it down while it flew around and spat fire at you? And it was already quite weary from its battle with me by the time you arrived—"–Okay, so even _Locke_had to admit that was stretching the truth a bit far— "and I accordingly demand not only to have my first pick, but also to receive fully _sixty percent _of all the treasure that lies within that hoard."

Locke groaned inwardly. True, he had only cast a few spells so far, but those he had were quite near to the limit of what he could do. He couldn't just go casting spells willy-nilly all day- it takes something out of you. He could've perhaps used some sort of enchantment to get her to become more agreeable, but he hadn't reviewed the incantations and the somatics in a few days, and those had to be absolutely perfect. That, and he didn't have the focus ready. He doubted that this woman would kindly wait for him to pull out his spellbook and do a quick reread, open his pouch and dig out the focus he needed, and then lay the spell on her without trying to cut him open with that vicious-looking sword of hers.

"If anything, I should be taking sixty percent. But you can have the first pick, if you agree to sixty-forty, so long as what you choose isn't a ring."

Locke silently shouted all of his favorite curses, and a few that he wasn't even overly fond of in the first place. The woman clearly knew about the ring, and clearly wanted it, as well. "You might as well have the first pick yourself, if you put a stipulation like that on it! And I demand that we divide the treasure fifty-fifty, to the very last copper mark! I propose that we take the entire hoard straight to a shopkeeper, who can appraise the value of each item, and then we divide them accordingly, drawing lots for who gets the first pick."

The woman suddenly dropped her hostility and gave him the same grin she had on her face when she'd finished off the dragon. Now that he saw it a little close up, he realized that what he had mislabeled as a triumphant quality was really more of a devious one. He supposed that, if he took a more level view, she wasn't a _bad _person, all in all. After all, she was just trying to get the same thing he was, the same way he was- aggressively. However, he just couldn't abide by someone trying to stand in his way. He'd been seeking that ring for a good twenty years, now, and that much time probably put this woman in her cradle. It was an epic case of 'I saw it first.'

"Agreed, 50-50, drawing lots for first pick. You'll accompany me until we reach town. " she said levelly.

_Laughing Budai... _Had he just accidentally agreed to spend _more _time with this infuriating woman? He figured that if she just gave him a little time to cool his temper, he could manage to be more civil. Of course, for him, a day would seem like a reasonable amount of time to accomplish such a thing. He wasn't sure how the woman was managing to get under his skin so easily- he suspected it was because she had refused to give him even partial credit for slaying the dragon- but he was determined to try to end their meeting as quickly as possible, if he could. He didn't like the way she seemed to know when he was acting and when he was not.

Maybe she would back out of the agreement if he just tried being as contrary as possible. "But you, as the more brute-strength oriented of us, will do all the carrying. I can fashion a large cart with magic, but it'll need someone to pull it. So I suppose you can carry the treasure while I, the better if we should meet up with some sort of trouble that needs fighting off, will guard our miniature caravan."

"I think my horse will fit the job of pack animal," she said with a slight tone of disgust. "Although I'd be glad to load the cart unsupervised with my _brute strength_, while you're off doing parlor tricks, if that's what you want."

Cursing his luck, he got her to agree that she wouldn't so much as go near the treasure until he'd finished the cart, and then they would load the cart together, where they could keep a close eye on one-another. He hoped that perhaps she might want to spend the time in a sullen sort of silence, irritated that he had driven such a hard bargain with her.

She did not.


End file.
